Nintendo making Wii games available on Nvidia Shield in China

Nintendo and Nvidia have been good friends as of late, with the Switch being powered by Nvidia’s Tegra X1 graphics processor. Now it looks like that partnership has extended past the Switch and over to Nvidia’s gaming platform Shield, at least in China. Gaming insider Daniel Ahmad posted on Twitter that the Nvidia Shield will be coming to Mainland China for 1499 RMB (around $226 USD) and will run PC games as well as Wii games.

Nvidia Shield is coming to Mainland China.

Will be priced at RMB 1499.

The Shield will focus on games in China. It will run popular PC games as well as Nintendo Wii games such as Mario Galaxy, Twilight Princess and Punch out. pic.twitter.com/gJlZrclps4

This does not mean in the slightest that Wii games will be coming to the Shield in the US, since China has a very strange relationship with gaming consoles, as they were banned up until 2015. What is interesting about these Wii games however are the fact that they run in HD and have been optimized to work on the Shield’s standard controller. Footage below of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess shows the button layout on the HUD to match that of a Shield controller.

Here is some gameplay of Twilight Princess running on Nvidia Shield.

It is said to be running in HD (Not sure what that means exactly in terms of the port).

Does this mean anything for Wii games on the Switch, or better yet Virtual Console? It’s difficult to say, but we would like to think so. Since this was a China-specific deal, it’s best we don’t read too much into what this means for Western audiences, though now we know it’s possible to optimize these games for different platforms.